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Challenge, Chapter 6: Post-9/11 Connections

Continuing on the Blogosphere Challenge on the Feith memo, the last part deals with Iraqi/al-Qaeda connections after 9/11, which would be the biggest impetus for America to include Saddam's removal as an integral part of the war on terror. Hayes continues:

Several reports indicate that the relationship between Saddam and bin Laden continued, even after the September 11 attacks:

31. An Oct. 2002 . . . report said al Qaeda and Iraq reached a secret agreement whereby Iraq would provide safe haven to al Qaeda members and provide them with money and weapons. The agreement reportedly prompted a large number of al Qaeda members to head to Iraq. The report also said that al Qaeda members involved in a fraudulent passport network for al Qaeda had been directed to procure 90 Iraqi and Syrian passports for al Qaeda personnel.

The analysis that accompanies that report indicates that the report fits the pattern of Iraq-al Qaeda collaboration:

References to procurement of false passports from Iraq and offers of safe haven previously have surfaced in CIA source reporting considered reliable. Intelligence reports to date have maintained that Iraqi support for al Qaeda usually involved providing training, obtaining passports, and offers of refuge. This report adds to that list by including weapons and money. This assistance would make sense in the aftermath of 9-11.

In President Bush's speech on September 20, 2001, he made it clear that the United States considered any government that provided support or shelter to al-Qaeda or any other terrorist groups that conspired to attack American interests to be an open target and a threat to our national security:

The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself. The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them[emphasis mine]. Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.

And the support alleged in this entry is extremely significant. First, according to this report, Iraq hosted al-Qaeda as a state policy, which was enough for us to attack the Taliban and remove them from power. Second, terrorists cannot operate in the open; governments that supply false identification and travel papers fatally undermine our national security by allowing these individuals to travel without notice. Even if this only occurred post-9/11, there is little doubt that al-Qaeda would still love to attack American homeland targets, and having professionally forged travel papers makes that much easier to do. This makes the Iraqi government a clear and present danger to the United States, given that they were doing this with full knowledge of the aims of al-Qaeda and of the Bush Doctrine on terrorism, as stated above. Not only is this very worrying, but it is also clearly not "old" data that, according to mainstream media outlets, has been "previously discredited". It predates the March 2003 hostilities by only a few months.

The next section, while not considered as solid by Feith and the intelligence service that collected the information, certainly seems to explain an awful lot about insurgency in postwar Iraq:

Colin Powell, in his February 5, 2003, presentation to the U.N. Security Council, revealed the activities of Abu Musab al Zarqawi. Reporting in the memo expands on Powell's case and might help explain some of the resistance the U.S. military is currently facing in Iraq.

37. Sensitive reporting indicates senior terrorist planner and close al Qaeda associate al Zarqawi has had an operational alliance with Iraqi officials. As of Oct. 2002, al Zarqawi maintained contacts with the IIS to procure weapons and explosives, including surface-to-air missiles from an IIS officer in Baghdad. According to sensitive reporting, al Zarqawi was setting up sleeper cells in Baghdad to be activated in case of a U.S. occupation of the city, suggesting his operational cooperation with the Iraqis may have deepened in recent months. Such cooperation could include IIS provision of a secure operating bases [sic] and steady access to arms and explosives in preparation for a possible U.S. invasion. Al Zarqawi's procurements from the Iraqis also could support al Qaeda operations against the U.S. or its allies elsewhere.

38. According to sensitive reporting, a contact with good access who does not have an established reporting record: An Iraqi intelligence service officer said that as of mid-March the IIS was providing weapons to al Qaeda members located in northern Iraq, including rocket propelled grenade (RPG)-18 launchers. According to IIS information, northern Iraq-based al Qaeda members believed that the U.S. intended to strike al Qaeda targets during an anticipated assault against Ansar al-Islam positions.

The memo further reported pre-war intelligence which "claimed that an Iraqi intelligence official, praising Ansar al-Islam, provided it with $100,000 and agreed to continue to give assistance."

If true, this would not only demonstrate direct Iraqi support to al-Qaeda, but also would recast the "insurgency" currently operating primarily in the Sunni Triangle as an al-Qaeda operation, rather than an organic native resistance movement. Note that this data was collected and presented well before the current insurgency began (indeed, before the war began), and it accurately predicted the nature of the attacks: hand-held rocket and mortar attacks, and surface-to-air missiles.

Next, the rest of the Hayes article. Here are links to my previous posts: one, two, three, four, and five.

Why California?

So I'm here in California now, land of Ah-nold da Governator and Carls Jr hamburgers ... mmm, good.

The weather today is 65 degrees, sunny with a bit of wind.

In Minnesota? 32 degrees and snowing.

Heh.

On The Road Again ...

I'll be scaling down the blogging significantly for the next eight days, as I will be traveling to Southern California for the Thanksgiving holiday with the First Mate, our son and daughter-in-law, and our granddaughter, the Little Admiral. (She's 18 months old, and she's got Grampa wrapped around her little finger.) It'll be the first plane trip for her, and we're all praying that she'll sleep through it, or at least not get all wired up during the 4-hour flight. She'll be visiting Disneyland for the first time, so Grampa's bringing the camcorder and lots of film. I'll post the best picture of it once I get back and have the pictures developed.

I do plan on taking the computer with me -- I need something to do on the flight, and the laptop's got a DVD drive, so it's my little entertainment center. My father has a wireless network that needs some tweaking, so I'll be testing it out with my laptop. (How convenient for me!) I suspect I'll post a few short notes at the end of the day when I check my work e-mail, but nothing like the productivity I've been maintaining for the past six weeks. Keep checking in with me, and if you haven't had a chance to read the featured posts on the right, try a few and see what you think.

Have a happy Thanksgiving!

Lileks: Brilliant as Always

James Lileks is a Minnesota treasure, and his take on Nightline's decision to bump coverage of the President's bellwether speech at Whitehall to cover, of all things, Michael Jackson is a terrific example:

You know what? Michael Moore is right. There are many Americans who are ignorant of the world around them. And they’re all TV news producers. Two big bombs in Istanbul, and what’s the big story of the day? Following around a pervy slab of albino Play-Doh as he turns himself into the police. I was stunned to discover last night that Nightline not only covered the Jackson case in detail, but bumped coverage of the Whitehall speech, which was the most important speech since the Iraq campaign began and arguably the most important speech of the war, period.

You would expect that a major commercial media outlet like ABC, with a supposedly top-notch news program like Nightline, would be able to distinguish between what should have been a news flash and a major development in a critical policy change announced by a president in a speech made during a state visit. But apparently Ted Koppel and company believe the arrest status of a pop singer is more important, which should call into question Nightline's editorial policy, as Lileks also emphatically says:

Nightline, supposedly the Thinking Person’s Late Night Show, was split about whether a repudiation of 50 years of foreign policy was slightly more important than the arrest of a washed-up, crotch-grabbing yee-hee! squeaking nutball who was probably the horrid pedophile everyone already thought he was.

Read the whole thing. Later in the Bleat, he takes on a suddenly snarky Salaam Pax and in typically blunt Midwestern fashion, tells him to grow up. (via Instapundit)

France's Rushdie Moment

Power Line is referring readers to this FrontPage magazine article detailing how Islamofascism in France is destroying free speech:

“...I hope someone slits your throat, you dirty, Jew pig...”

France, once the land of Enlightenment, is turning into a place of darkness, thanks to Islamist fanaticism.

Death threats like the one above have forced a French publishing house to cancel plans this month to publish a translated version of American author Robert Spencer’s book, Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About The World’s Fastest Growing Faith.

As I posted earlier this morning, this is the cause for which the totalitarian apologists and their clueless followers march in Trafalgar Square, the Mall in Washington, and in cities near you. Followers of Islam, the "religion of peace", have shut down the publication of a book which dares to analyze the Qu'ran and its message of jihad. Fascism can abide no dissent -- and make no mistake about it, Islamists are the new Fascisti, determined to silence the unbelievers into dhimmitude or, if that cannot be done, to kill them and so silence them permanently. The author notes the laughably gargantuan gap between the PR of militant Islamism and its reality:

“What you have here is a subjugation of public opinion in France,” he said. “It’s ironic. If you don’t say Islam is a religion of peace, they will kill you. My book doesn’t advocate murdering anyone. It only investigates questions about Islam, but it is so threatening that they’ll kill to silence it.”

France is particularly vulnerable to this incursion against human rights and Western values due to its centuries of colonial interference in North Africa; a significant minority of the French is Muslim (estimates vary between 10-15%), and it is widely believed that Muslims may comprise the plurality of France within one or two more generations. French politicians therefore are loath to confront Islamism, believing in the safety of appeasement -- as if that's worked for France in the past. For instance, as Front Page notes, the French publishing industry has had no problems producing this:

While people are threatened with death over publication of Spencer’s work, the novel Rever la Palestine (Dream of Palestine) faced no apparent obstacles in reaching the booksellers. Published by France’s third-largest publishing house, Rever is intended for young people and concerns Palestinian teenagers fighting against “bloodthirsty Jews, who assassinate children, and old people, profane mosques, and rape Arab women.”

The fifteen-year-old author, an Egyptian living in Italy, has one of the book’s characters calling for a Jihad against the Jews, while the main character becomes a suicide bomber who kills five Israelis.

Read the entire article, and weep for the nation that once was France. It is dying, and the French are selling themselves into dhimmitude.

Challenge, Chapter 5: Mainstream Media Gets Interested, But To What Purpose?

Finally, some of the mainstream media has taken an interest in the Feith memo, as reported by Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard. Unfortunately, Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball wrote a report that seemed to care more about the fact that the Weekly Standard is owned by Rupert Murdoch than in the evidence at hand. Here's the second paragraph:

CASE CLOSED blared the headline in a Weekly Standard cover story last Saturday that purported to have unearthed the U.S. government’s “secret evidence of cooperation” between Saddam and bin Laden. Fred Barnes, the magazine’s executive editor, touted the magazine’s scoop the next day in a roundtable chat on “Fox News Sunday.” (Both the Standard and Fox News Channel are owned by the conservative media baron Rupert Murdoch.) [bold emphasis mine -- CE] “These are hard facts, and I’d like to see you refute any one of them,” he told a skeptical Juan Williams of National Public Radio.

Specific facts and critical arguments don't show up until after Isikoff and Hosenball make sure you know that this is all a Murdoch-inspired, if not Murdoch-financed, attempt to smear the good names of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. When they do get down to facts, they don't seem to do a good job of getting them right, as Stephen Hayes points out in his rebuttal:

The Newsweek story goes on: "While Hayes's story insists 'the bulk of the reporting . . . contradicts [Abdallah's] claim,' the actual examples cited in the memo to buttress this point are less than persuasive." The Newsweek writers offer two examples--allegations that Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague and reporting from Ibn al-Shayk al-Libi, a senior al Qaeda operative who was captured in Pakistan and turned over to U.S. custody in early January 2002.

The most recent alleged Atta meeting, in April 2001, is disputed, a fact THE WEEKLY STANDARD article makes clear. Isikoff and Hosenball claim that the intelligence is bogus, as U.S. investigators have "not unearthed a scintilla of evidence that Atta was even in Prague at the time of the alleged rendezvous." (See Edward Jay Epstein's recent report in Slate for a fuller account of the controversy over this meeting.)

Czech intelligence, however, reports not one but four meetings between Iraqi intelligence and Atta. The CIA can confirm two Atta visits to Prague, but "data surrounding the other two--on 26 Oct 1999 and 9 April 2001--is complicated and sometimes contradictory and CIA and FBI cannot confirm Atta met with the IIS." This disclaimer was reported in THE WEEKLY STANDARD article, which also noted that the Czech government continues to stand by its reporting.

When I read the original Hayes article, it was very clear that Feith and Hayes spoke about four visits, not one, and was also clear that the April 2001 visit alleged by Czech intelligence had been the most difficult to verify. However, the Newsweek article never mentions any other visits by Atta to Prague, even though these visits were crucial to understanding the memo, as explained by Edward Jay Epstein in Slate, hardly a Murdoch co-conspirator:

It was known, however, that Atta had business in Prague prior to the 9/11 attack. Kmonicek, the deputy foreign minister, had found a paper trail of passport records showing that Atta had applied for a visa to visit the Czech Republic on May 26, 2000 in Bonn, Germany. Atta must have had business there, since he could have transited through the Czech Republic on Czech Air without a visa. ...

When Atta learned in Hamburg that his Czech visa would not be ready until May 31, he nevertheless flew on May 30 to the Prague International Airport, where he would not be allowed to go beyond the transit lounge. Although a large part of this area is surveiled by cameras, he managed to spend all but a few minutes out of their range. After some six hours, he then caught a flight back to Hamburg. From this visaless round trip, Czech intelligence inferred that Atta had a meeting on May 30 that could not wait, even a day—and that whoever arranged it was probably familiar with the transit lounge's surveillance. Finally, the BIS determined that the Prague connection was not limited to a single appointment since Atta returned to Prague by bus on June 2 (now with visa BONN200005260024), and, after a brief wait in the bus station, disappeared for nearly 20 hours before catching a flight to the United States.

Why was all this important -- Atta's movements between Hamburg and Prague, and on which days he went where?

The Czechs reviewing these visits in retrospect further assumed that Atta's business in Prague was somehow related to his activities in the United States, given that large sums of laundered funds began to flow to the 9/11 conspiracy in June 2000, after Atta left Prague. Even more ominous, if the BIS's subsequent identification of Atta in Prague was accurate, then some part of the mechanism behind the activities of hijacker-terrorists may have been based in Prague at least until mid April 2001.

So when Isikoff and Hosenball only focus on the one meeting, which Hayes and the Feith memo both agree was the murkiest, to discredit the entire memo without ever mentioning the other unusual visits for which there is ample evidence, it implies less sloppiness than outright, deliberate obtuseness. Hayes has more ammunition as well:

The Newsweek authors also cite an unnamed "U.S. official" who claims that the intelligence in the memo was selectively presented and "contradicted by other things." To support this argument, Isikoff and Hosenball cite a late 1998 trip to Afghanistan by Faruq Hijazi. Hijazi served Saddam Hussein both as deputy director of Iraqi intelligence and later as ambassador to Turkey. At that meeting, the authors contend, bin Laden rejected an Iraqi offer of asylum. Their source is Vince Cannistraro, a knowledgeable former CIA counterterrorism official--the kind of expert whose views should be taken very seriously. He may be right. And if his understanding of the meeting's outcome is accurate, that information certainly should have been included in the Feith memo.

But stop for a moment and consider what this analysis means. It demonstrates that at the very least, Saddam Hussein was willing to give Osama bin Laden asylum in Iraq. Is this not precisely the kind of collusion the administration cited as it made its case for war? If such a distinguished skeptic of the links believes that Saddam Hussein would have offered bin Laden asylum, why is it so hard to believe--to take one example from a "well-placed source" cited in the Feith memo--that Hussein sent his intelligence director to bin Laden's farm in 1996 to train the al Qaeda leader in explosives? Or, to take another from a "regular and reliable source" mentioned in the memo, that bin Laden's No. 2, Ayman al Zawahiri, "visited Baghdad and met with the Iraqi Vice President on 3 February 1998"?

These concerns never occurred to Isikoff and Hosenball, who treat the Feith memo as a prosecution, a law-enforcement case where anything less than guilt beyond a reasonable doubt is a lie. But intelligence gathering, and war in general, is not law enforcement, and evidentiary parsing such as this is useless. Again, you have to look at context, which is what Hayes has consistently tried to provide.

Prior to 9/11, the Newsweek approach may have made some sense, if you preferred to combat terrorism using the Clintonian law-enforcement approach. This evidence may or may not have supported an indictment (which the Reno Justice Department actually got, and which I note Isikoff and Hosenball never mention), and so sitting and waiting to see if any further information could be developed was certainly an option, and it was the one we used. After 9/11, it became apparent that the law-enforcement indictment process was not going to secure Americans against attack, and that a severe threat faced the US. The best intelligence we had indicated strong links between Saddam Hussein, who was in the middle of defying 16 UNSC resolutions and the cease-fire agreement that halted Gulf War hostilities, and al-Qaeda, who had just murdered 3,000 American civilians in the worst foreign attack in our history. Waiting around for more information to develop would mean allowing more collusion between Saddam and Osama, while Saddam kept refusing to account for massive amounts of chemical and biological agents. Afghanistan was the primary target, since it actively housed Osama's gang. But Saddam had to be next.

Was the intelligence accurate? We won't know that until we get a complete airing of the data, without having to trip over mainstream media who don't want to tell the whole story and who keep trying to discredit Hayes with half-truths and crucial omissions. CNN's interview with James Woolsey, CIA chief under Clinton, has him saying that the evidence he's seen makes the connection theory a "slam dunk". George Tenet and Colin Powell, who are supposed to be the skeptics of this administration, have both enthusiastically pushed this interpretation of the intelligence they've seen. The Justice Department, in 1998, thought the evidence strong enough that they returned an indictment against Osama which referenced an agreement between him and Saddam. Maybe it isn't "case closed," as Hayes proclaimed, but as Glenn Reynolds said yesterday, we'd settle for mainstream media acknowledging that it's at least "case open." That won't happen until the blogosphere keeps pushing for an in-depth review of all data possibly linking al-Qaeda to Iraq.

UPDATE: LT Smash has an excellent extended post into this matter. His post goes through some different points of contention than I've addressed here, so be sure to read all the way through his stuff, and check out all of his embedded links. His conclusion -- "The war in Iraq was, in fact, a legitimate act of self-defense by the United States of America" -- seems to be borne out by the intelligence we're finally getting a chance to see.

Demosophia also expresses his disgust with the Isikoff/Hosenball article here. He does a fine job of noting the ridiculously poor job those authors did in actually reading and understanding the article.

News You'll Never See

I'm trying to avoid the whole Creepy Jacko thing, but certain odd points just seem to beg for a bit of blogging. Take this, for instance, from his brother Jermaine:

Jackson's brother Jermaine denounced the allegations in a CNN interview as "nothing but a modern-day lynching." "This is what they want to see: him in handcuffs. You got it. But it won't be for long, I promise you," Jermaine Jackson said.

Modern-day lynching? Tom Daschle had this to say about Jermaine's choice of words:

"I was offended. I think it was unfortunate," Daschle said. "I think those within the civil rights leadership who have commented and have asked for an apology are right."

And this from the LCCR:

"Either [he] has conveniently forgotten a frightening period of American history, or he is willfully demeaning all those African-Americans who were hung from trees throughout the period of racial segregation in the South," said Wade Henderson, the director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.

Oh, wait ... they didn't say that about Jermaine -- they said it about Senator Zell Miller when he used the term "lynching" to describe the treatment Justice Janice Rogers Brown has been receiving from filibuster-happy Democrats. I don't understand, especially from the LCCR; aren't they the ones protecting the legacy of "African-Americans who were hung from trees throughout the period of racial segregation in the South" by viciously opposing successful African-Americans? Why hasn't he spoken out here?

Behind The Protests ... Same Old Crowd

Hindrocket returns from Britain with perspective on President Bush's visit and the protests that have ensued. Power Line posts Hindrocket's extensive post, which is definitely worth a read:

What was most striking to me was the utter lack of substance in most coverage of the visit. The focus was almost exclusively on the security precautions attending the trip, which were pretty universally frowned upon, and the demonstrations against President Bush, which were hoped-for, salivated over, and covered with gusto. No one spoiled the mood by reminding readers that these were the same tired demonstrations (and largely the same tired demonstrators) who have greeted past American presidents. The BBC, for the most part, disdained to cover the visit at all.

Hindrocket spent quite a bit of time in England and had a chance to look into the guiding spirits behind these tired, and oddly absent, demonstrators. Not surprisingly, some familiar faces appeared during his investigation:

It isn't hard to find out who the leaders of the anti-Bush demonstrations are; I picked up one of their leaflets on the street. It gave the URL for the "Stop the War Coalition" as http://www.stopwar.org.uk. ... In 2001 the Stop the War Coalition elected a Steering Committee which included such luminaries as Mohammed Aslam Aijaz of the London Council of Mosques and Saddam apologist Tariq Ali. ... But there's more: the Stop the War Coalition's Steering Committee includes George Galloway, who was thrown out of the Labour Party on suspicion--soon to be confirmed, I think--of being on Saddam's payroll; John Rees, long-time English Communist whose tracts on Marxism continue to be published for an ever-dwindling audience; Ghayasuddin Siddiqui, member of the Muslim Parliament of Great Britain, who considered Sept. 11 a "very positive [development], one that would allow the Muslim community to get out of their ghettos and play a role in mainstream politics, in this case a mass protest movement."

Read the entire post -- it is very, very illuminating. It seems to me that these people are an echo of the German-American Bund, who loudly demonstrated during the 30s to impress upon Americans the friendliness of the volk running the Fatherland at the time, and loudly claiming that a cabal of Jewish reactionaries were controlling FDR, pushing him into needless confrontation with those polite, friendly Germans who only wanted to return to prosperity and recover land and sovereignty stolen from them at Versailles. They also evoke the Communists of the same period, who spent the 30s extolling the Soviet Union as a worker's paradise while millions were starved, tortured, and imprisoned during Stalin's reign of terror. After the non-aggression pact, CPUSA demonstrated to keep America neutral; after Hitler double-crossed Stalin, CPUSA started screaming for American intervention.

So when we see protests like these, with idiots like these screaming insipid slogans like "Bush, Blair, CIA, How many kids did you kill today," it's crucial to know who funds these things, whose philosophy guides them, and their true intent. Like they did in France in 1939-40, these die-hard Stalinists and fascists are determined to grind down morale until the West shrugs its shoulders and abandons its positions on the wall. They wait for their chance to swarm over, kick us to the side of the road, and let a long, dark night of totalitarian rule fall over the Western world. They cannot win unless we refuse to fight; we cannot lose unless we first lose all hope.

All Your Foreign Policies Are Belong To Us

Thousands of British protestors are storming the streets ... well, sort of, as David Carr lets us know at Samizdata:

I took my camera along because, frankly, I was expecting sparks to fly but as I stepped out of Goodge Street Underground Station into the pre-demo melee, I detected an atmosphere that I judged to be disappointingly muted. Perhaps I had set the bar of my expectations too high. The gathering protestors seemed to me to be quite bouyant but way short of combustible. You don't spend three decades attending soccer matches in England without developing a sense of smell for impending mob violence. There was not even a whiff of it here.

Carr notes that the turnout was much less than trumpeted, although it was estimated at 70,000, which is not a small showing. He details the composition of the crowd as a "usual suspects" crowd consisting of:

Socialist Workers, Young Socialist Workers, Old Socialist Workers, Retired Socialist Workers, Communist Revolutionaries, Trade Unionists, Enviro-mentalists, Gay Rights, Animal Rights, Anarchist Rights, a whole slew of ageing CND veterans, a mere smattering of Islamic banners and one po-faced old duffer demanding 'Subsidies For The Arts Now!'. No, this was pretty much a whitebread event. Or, more accurately, a redbread event. It was if the Guardian has disgorged the contents of its subscription database onto the streets of London.

Now, everyone has a right to speak up in a democracy; as Bush tellingly reminded the protestors last night, it's a right that the Iraqis have just now been able to exercise as well, no thanks to this crowd. But we're not about to allow our foreign policy and national security to be dictated by people like this:

Yes, from right to left, Fred Flintstone, Barney Rubble, and Fred's mother-in-law want to protect us by disarming us. Great costumes, bad teeth, and no brains. Exactly what I look for in serious political debate.

Read the whole thing. Like one of his commenters note, David Carr has a gift for satire.

UN Details al-Qaeda Threat

The UN, which has consistently been AWOL in the war on terror, reports on al-Qaeda capabilities:

Some members of al Qaeda most likely possess portable surface-to-air missiles and may use them to target military transport planes, a U.N. report says.

The threat was among several findings detailed in the report by the United Nations' al Qaeda and Taliban Sanctions Committee which also cited a shifting of the terror network's strategy, a move towards "softer" targets and a warning the group was working towards a biological or chemical attack.

Gee, I wonder where they might have gotten chemical or biological weapons??

The report also identifies Iraq as "fertile ground" for al Qaeda, which receives the "funds it needs from charities, deep pocket donors, and business and criminal activities, including the drug trade."

Iraq was fertile ground for al-Qaeda, as British and American intelligence knew for years. The report will be published later this month, but if they only focus on the present instead of where al-Qaeda received funding, shelter, and support in the past, the report will be nothing more than a whitewash. But with countries like Syria serving on the UN committee on counterterrorism, my guess is that a whitewash may be the best result.

The report will confirm something that I've been saying for a few days now, too:

However, the killings and detentions of several members of al Qaeda has damaged the terror network, Munoz said. "They don't have today the capacity to attack the World [Trade Center] towers as they did on the 11th of September, 2001," he said. "That capacity they don't have, that has been destroyed."

In other words, the American war on terrorism, and specifically al-Qaeda, has been effective. The country is safer -- not completely safe -- but we are eroding the ability of this organization to mount large-scale operations against America and its citizens. As long as we persevere, we will continue to erode its operational capability and eventually cut off all support, which will reduce al-Qaeda to rockthrowers. Will the report actually connect those dots? Unlikely.